Industry: Financial Services
Company size: 5001 to 10000 Employees
Business challenge
The demand for faster processes and automation in today’s competitive landscape requires more business applications to be built with greater speed and efficiency. As a result, IT teams are under immense pressure. Inundated with a huge pipeline of requests for new business-critical apps, IT departments face never-ending backlogs and struggle to quickly deliver solutions that enable line-of-business employees to do their jobs more efficiently.
To ease the burden on IT and give business users the power to build solutions faster and with less rework, our client, a large Canadian-based financial institution with hundreds of locations, embraced App Maker, the Google Workspace low-code application development tool for building custom business apps. App Maker allowed anyone in the organization to develop and create apps, and over three years, the company created 80 applications. The apps primarily collect information and push data out into a form or automate workflows that guide employees to next steps based upon customers’ responses. They sped up work and helped reduce errors, which enabled the financial institution to provide better customer service.
In early 2020, Google announced that App Maker would be “turned down” gradually and officially shut down on Jan.19, 2021. As an alternative, Google recommended its newly acquired AppSheet, which supports Cloud SQL databases and allows the rebuild of an application using the existing data tied to App Maker. Google App Engine can also be used to build and deploy Google Cloud Platform (GCP) applications.
With the deadline for App Maker’s deprecation fast approaching, our client needed to move quickly onto AppSheet to ensure its citizen developers could continue to easily create the applications the company had come to rely on.
Solution & results
The financial institution decided to migrate several of its existing apps to AppSheet. With a tight schedule and need for a swift turnaround, the company reached out to SADA to leverage our technical expertise and get-it-done attitude to recreate many of those critical apps.
SADA put its experience to work for the financial institution to:
- Migrate several apps to AppSheet in just three months, ensuring efficient work processes for an improved customer experience
- Save 369 hours of engineering time, enabling it to focus on internal technology priorities
- Establish AppSheet as a proven no-code tool to empower citizen developers—not dependent on the IT department
Together, SADA and the client successfully completed the project on time and according to specification. By leveraging SADA to get their apps recreated by the deprecation date, the financial institution was able to continue internal work that was really important to the organization.
In addition to the relationship with SADA, the financial institution developed a close relationship with Google’s AppSheet developers who have been responsive to feedback for enhancements specifically for the financial industry. For example, to increase app security, the client suggested that AppSheet support connecting to SQL databases via a private IP address, which is now on the product roadmap for 2021.
